nukes, nuts, news

Feeling the urge to open up, “It’s been four months since my last confession.” This space truly has been an empty hole for a good stretch. I’ve been absorbed in a finishing a series on the nuclear fuel chain, Nukes of Hazard, for the Current.

I’ve posted two worthwhile blogs since. One, Speaking from the Edge of the End, attempts to round-out my personal feelings about the series as San Antonio’s City Council reaches for another $400 mil to feed the nuke monster. Another questions our apparent inability to talk alternatives (despite MSM promises of a front-page Sunday feature weighing non-polluting options).

So, the vote comes, and clean-energy advocates are taking their fight to another level: threatening to raise 10,000 signatures from unincorporated CPS Energy customers and fight nuke-related bill increases before the Texas Public Utility Commission. In short: the thing will not die with Thursday’s vote.

Watching San Antonio energy politics, the pace of renewables development, and the clean-energy lurch in federal priorities under Obama, I feel a bit like the former Hanford nuke worker I interviewed for the third Hazard installment, Until the End of the World. Kirk Drumheller surmised that while the nuclear-fusion solution to radioactive waste may one day arrive, by the time it gets here the pricing and efficiency of renewable sources will be so good it will be an unremarkable event.

Our energy landscape is shifting so fast in favor of renewable solutions that don’t carry national security risks that soon enough it will be little more than a haunting memory. First, we have to survive it.